Tag: Furniture

Almost everything in the world is designed for people of average adult size.

As a result, most everyday objects (furniture, stairs, door handles, etc.) are a totally inconvenient size for children or the extremely short.

This is somewhat surprising, since everyone spent many years facing these problems as a small child.

But it was so long ago that no one really remembers! (This is also a classic example of the market failing to address the needs of a demographic with zero purchasing power.)

Proposal:

Here, we propose re-furnishing a shopping mall so that every object is sized to give you (as an adult) the approximate impression of scale that a three- or four-year old would have.

In other words, we approximately double the size of everything in the mall in all three dimensions (e.g. a 3-foot high table is now 6 feet high, and doors are 15+ feet tall).

The building would also need to have an exceptionally high ceiling in order to accommodate the larger furniture (see Figure 1).

Fig. 1: All the furniture is scaled up proportionately. This chair is now basically unusable by the average-height mall patron (left).

Additionally, if this “everything is enormous” business were to sell food or beverages, those should also be scaled up (Figure 2).

Fig. 2:In the spirit of scaling up everything, a “regular sized” coffee would be served in an enormous gallon-sized mug (Figure 2). A hamburger scaled up in this way would contain approximately 6,000 calories.

Conclusion:

Since there are so many malls that have gone out of business due to the convenience of Internet shopping [1], there should be plenty of abandoned real-estate that can be repurposed for this plan.

PROS: Provides useful perspective to product designers. Also allows people to re-live their childhood in the most inconvenient way possible, thus saving them from unwarranted nostalgia.

CONS: The potential for breaking bones in this out-of-scale environment is extremely high. Not everything scales up in a strictly linear fashion (e.g. a fall off a 6-foot-high table would be more than twice as injury-causing as a fall off a three-foot-high table).

[1] (Some people dispute this, and suggest that another factor could have caused it, such as haunting by ghosts.)

It’s difficult to move heavy furniture around, so furniture is usually positioned for general use, even if there are specific setups that would be better for rare situations.

For example, your home might have a room that would be best configured in one way for watching movies, but a different way for a Thanksgiving dinner.

The issue:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense to move your furniture around every time you want to watch a movie, so furniture is almost always set up in a “good enough” general configuration. Until now, that is!

Proposal:

If furniture could “magically” move around on its own, it would be easy to have a room reconfigure itself so that you could, for example:

Optimize a room for exercise / yoga (Figure 2a), with a large empty space in the middle.

Have a “poker night” configuration (Figure 2b) where seating is clustered around a central table.

Have a single wall in your house dedicated as an indoor climbing wall, along with a padded floor mat that would slide out from “nowhere” (perhaps from under a dresser or sofa).

Have a large dining table that can automatically hide itself away when dinner is over.

Various layouts could be saved as furniture presets (Figure 1) that would be accessible at the press of a button. (This would be similar to how presets work on a motorized standing desk.)

Fig. 1: All four of these layouts contain the same furniture, except for the red futon, which is mysteriously absent from the Yoga Zone layout. Maybe it slithered its way into another room.

Fig. 2a: An example “yoga” layout, where the center of the room is cleared. These 3D views were generated using the program “Sweet Home 3D” (http://www.sweethome3d.com/) on the Mac.

Fig. 2c: A “movie night” configuration that focuses on the television.

Method of implementation:

Each furniture leg would sit atop a motorized omni-directional wheel.

Any time you need to reconfigure a room, you just push a single button (perhaps labeled “THANKSGIVING DINNER” or “YOGA STUDIO”), and the furniture rolls into the pre-determined new configuration.

The furniture would need a few sensors in it, so that it would be able to detect unexpected obstacles / pets / etc. in the way.

It might be annoying to keep your furniture batteries charged, so the motorized furniture could automatically seek out power outlets and charge itself overnight while the homeowner is sleeping. (As a proof-of-concept of this idea, the Roomba vacuuming robot is capable of automatically returning itself to a charging station.)

Fig. 2d: This is what the room above might look like in an awkward but perhaps “good enough” default configuration that isn’t optimized for any specific use case.

Conclusion:

You should throw out all of your existing furniture and get new Internet-connected furniture with powered wheels.

The problem of dealing with plugged-in electronics (like a television or set of speakers) is left as an exercise to the reader.

PROS: Even a small apartment can now feel enormous, since it can be reconfigured for every use case.

CONS: This “Internet of things” furniture will probably be hacked by someone who will randomly move your furniture around just for amusement.

But none of these styles are specifically aiming to minimize the number of visible surfaces in a building or interior.

Proposal:

In order to bring the “1996 Playstation graphics” look to interior design, the following easy-to-assemble low-polygon furnishings are proposed:

Fig. 1: At left, we see a normal chair. On the right, the number of visible surfaces has been reduced to almost the bare minimum. The chair on the right could easily be rendered by a Nintendo 64.

Fig. 2: Even this blocky chair still consists of 32 triangles. For computer-related reasons, surfaces are counted in triangles (the most minimalist polygon) rather than rectangles. Note that this chair essentially consists of three stretched-out cubes. Normally that would result in 36 triangles (3 cubes * 6 faces/cube * 2 triangles / face = 36 triangles), but we have saved a few triangles by merging the cubes in this way.

Fig. 3: The standard lamp (left) can be converted into a low-poly lamp (right). The cord is unaffected—a segmented low-poly cord would unfortunately violate the electrical safety codes in most jurisdictions.

Fig. 4: The lamp above can be reduced to 21 surface-facing triangles if we allow the base (labeled “1*”) to be a single triangle.

PROS: This never-before-seen look combines minimalism with early-3D nostalgia in a way that is appealing to everyone.

CONS: Only slightly different from existing furniture you can get at IKEA, so differentiation of this style from “the cheapest possible furniture” style may be difficult. Safety regulations prevent the use of low-poly stylings everyone (e.g. in electrical cords).